On Thursday, Atlassian announced its acquisition of Rewatch, a tool designed to revolutionize meeting notes with AI, and its upcoming integration into both Loom, its video messaging platform, and the newly launched Rovo AI. This move is aimed at streamlining the process from meeting recordings to actionable business outcomes, such as turning discussions directly into Jira issues and making transcripts readily searchable within a company’s ecosystem.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, Rewatch had previously secured a $20 million Series A investment led by Andreessen Horowitz in the early days of 2021, a period marked by a surge in the development of video-centric technologies, without pursuing further funding, as per Crunchbase.
In an exclusive chat, Loom’s co-founder Joe Thomas revealed the rationale behind the acquisition. Although Loom had an existing feature for recording Zoom meetings and generating transcripts, integrating Rewatch’s technology would significantly enhance their platform’s capabilities. “Integrating Rewatch’s impressive technological stack into Loom will not only accelerate our efforts but also enable Atlassian to leverage meeting recordings to their full potential,” Thomas stated, highlighting the synergy between Loom’s transcript generation and Rovo AI’s unified enterprise search capabilities.
The collaboration between Loom and Rewatch, which share a common investor in Andreessen Horowitz, seemed natural. The discovery and subsequent merger discussions were initiated by Atlassian’s corporate development team. Thomas is optimistic about the integration, citing the transition of Loom’s tech stack to the Atlassian platform as a step that will simplify the process.
However, Thomas acknowledges challenges ahead, specifically in tuning the AI to understand the context of meetings accurately and provide users with relevant action items. “Achieving a balance where the AI consistently suggests the correct follow-ups will be key to user adoption and satisfaction,” he explained. Atlassian anticipates a period of experimentation over the next six to twelve months to refine this aspect.
An additional feature from Rewatch that attracted Atlassian’s interest is its calendar integration, simplifying meeting management for users. The integration promises to make activating the meeting bot for specific meetings a seamless process, alongside offering automation for distributing notes to participants. Despite the potential complexities in perfecting this feature, the prospect of a more intuitive user experience is promising.
Upon completion of the integration, the enhanced Loom AI agent will seamlessly join meetings across platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, streamlining the creation of transcripts, notes, and action items. These can then be automatically linked to relevant corporate tools like Confluence pages and Jira issues.
Loom aims to continue empowering workplace communication with over 31 million users and 360 million videos, generating more than a billion views. Atlassian’s acquisition of Rewatch underscores its commitment to enriching the palette of video communication tools by facilitating more sophisticated and interactive business discussions.